Thomas Hughes

“ It was evening when the housekeeper summoned him to the sick-room. Arthur was lying on the sofa by the open window, through which the rays of the western sun stole gently, lighting up his white face and golden hair. Tom remembered a German picture of an angel which he knew; often he had thought how transparent and golden and spiritlike it was; and he shuddered to think how like it Arthur looked, and felt a shock as if his blood had all stopped short as he realized how near the other world his friend must have been to look like that. ”

“ Aye! and though we may have followed other voices, have we not, while following them, confessed in our hearts that all true strength, and nobleness, and manliness was to be found in the other path. Do I say that most of us have had to tread this path and fight this battle? Surely I might have said all of us; all, at least, who have passed the bright days of their boyhood. The clear and keen intellect no less than the dull and heavy; the weak, the cold, the nervous, no less than the strong and passionate of body. ”

“ THE BROWN COMPROMISE.
"That's just the point," said Tom; "I don't object to a compromise where you don't give up your principle."
"Not you," said East, laughingly. "I know him of old, Arthur, and you'll find him out some day. There isn't such a reasonable fellow in the world, to hear him talk. He never wants anything but what's right and fair; only when you come to settle what's right and fair, it's everything that he wants, and nothing that you want. And that's his idea of a compromise. Give me the Brown compromise when I'm on his side."
"Now, Harry," said Tom, "no more chaff—I'm serious. ”

“ For while it is up, there is nothing but very shallow, muddy water to be seen, on which the faithful old sun, try as he will, can paint no pictures. Whereas at low tide, the colours of these sandy wastes—the steely gleam of the wet parts, the bright yellow of the dry, and the warm and rich tints of brown of the intermediate, and the quaint, black line of the pier, running out across them all till it reaches the pale blue of the channel, where the fishing-boats all lie at anchor round the pier-head at sunset—are one perpetual feast, even to the untrained eye. ”

“ I have myself been heavy-hearted ever since I heard he had been called away from us, and shall never think of his cheery voice, his hearty greeting, his kindly, loving words, without a sharp pang of regret that I shall no more in this life meet with him I loved so well, and admired as the finest specimen of the high-minded, earnest, true-hearted English gentleman it has been my lot to meet with. He was too good for this hard, selfish generation, and he is in God’s mercy called away to that better world, where love and truth and peace dwell undisturbed in the presence of our blessed Lord. ”

“ He had given them all a great tea under the big elm in their playground, for which Madam Brown had supplied the biggest cake ever seen in our village; and Tom was really as sorry to leave them as they to lose him, but his sorrow was not unmixed with the pride and excitement of making a new step in life.
And this feeling carried him through his first parting with his mother better than could have been expected. Their love was as fair and whole as human love can be, perfect self-sacrifice on the one side, meeting a young and true heart on the other. ”

“ They may grind me to powder, but I have that in me which is above them, which will own no obedience to them. Dead laws are, so far as I can see, just what you and I and all mankind have been put into this world to fight against. Call them laws of nature if you will, I do not care. Take the commonest, the most universal; is it or is it not by the law of nature that the ground brings forth briers and all sorts of noxious and useless weeds if you let it alone? If it is by the law of nature, am I to obey the law, or to dig my garden and root out the weeds? ”

“ He needn't have troubled himself; it was this very strength and power so different from his own which drew Arthur so to him.
Arthur laid his thin white hand, on which the blue veins stood out so plainly, on Tom's great brown fist, and smiled at him; and then looked out of the window again, as if he couldn't bear to lose a moment of the sunset, into the tops of the great feathery elms, round which the rooks were circling and clanging, returning in flocks from their evening's foraging parties. ”

“ And when we have made this faith our own, when we believe it, and not merely believe that we believe it, we have in our hand the clue to all human history. Mysteries in abundance will always remain. We may not be able to trace the workings of the law of righteousness in the confusions and bewilderments of our own day, or through the darkness and mist which shrouds so much of the life of other times and other races. But we know that it is there, and that it has its ground in a righteous will, which was the same a thousand years ago as it is to-day, which every man and nation can get to know ”

“ There is no place on earth, from the back-slums of great cities to the mountain-peak or mid-ocean, to which early morns and evening twilights do not bring daily, or almost daily, some touch of the beauty of light-pictures which sun and moon and stars paint for us so patiently, whether we heed them or no; but to get them in their full perfection, one should be able to look at them in the light, dry, warm air of such places as these volcanic highlands of Auvergne. ”

“ Into such a parish and state of society, Arthur's father had been thrown at the age of twenty-five, a young married parson, full of faith, hope, and love. He had battled with it like a man, and had lots of fine Utopian ideas about the perfectibility of mankind, glorious humanity and such-like, knocked out of his head; and a real wholesome Christian love for the poor struggling, sinning men, of whom he felt himself one, and with and for whom he spent fortune, and strength, and life, driven into his heart. He had battled like a man, and gotten a man's reward. ”

“ Does not every man recognize in his own life, and in his own observation of the world around him, the enormous and radical difference between the two principles of action and the results which they bring about? What man do we reckon worthy of honor, and delight to obey and follow—him who asks, when he has to act, what will A, B, and C say to this? or him who asks, is this right, true, just, in harmony with the will of God. Don’t we despise ourselves when we give way to the former tendency, or in other words, when we admit the sovereignty of public opinion? ”

“ Our first stop at a Bulgarian village—or town, perhaps, I should call it, for it boasted a tumble-down fort, with some rude earthworks, and half a dozen minarets shot up from amongst its houses and vineyards—may be reckoned amongst the chief of these. What can be more utterly new to an Englishman than to come upon a crowd of poor men, who have their daily bread to earn, half of whom are quietly asleep, and the rest squatting or standing about, without offering, or thinking of offering, to help when there is work to be done under their noses? ”

“ Then there was the music of the rattling harness, and the ring of the horses' feet on the hard road, and the glare of the two bright lamps through the steaming hoar frost, over the leaders' ears, into the darkness; and the cheery toot of the guard's horn, to warn some drowsy pikeman or the ostler at the next change; and the looking forward to daylight—and last, but not least, the delight of returning sensation in your toes.
Then the break of dawn and the sunrise, where can they be ever seen in perfection but from a coach roof? You want motion and change and music to see them in their glory ”

“ It is a strange, blind sort of world we are in, with lots of blind alleys, down which we go blundering in the fog after some seedy gaslight, which we take for the sun till we run against the wall at the end, and find out that the light is a gaslight, and that there’s no thoroughfare. But for all that, one does get on. You get to know the sun’s light better and better, and to keep out of the blind alleys; and I am surer and surer every day that there’s always sunlight enough for every honest fellow, and a good sound road under his feet, if he will only step out on it. ”

“ To me, accustomed to the scrambling, and shouting, and hauling up above high-water mark, the running of naked-legged boys into the water, and the energetic doings of the crew when a fishing boat comes to land at home, there is something of the comically sublime in the contrast presented by these good Flemings. As one of the old brown tubs rolls towards the shore, looking as if she scarcely had made up her mind which end to send in first, you see a man quietly pitch a small anchor over the bows, and then down come the two sails. ”

“ From his earliest boyhood up Tom Brown is the free and equal comrade of other decent boys of whatever station, and he ranges the woods, the fields, the streams with the joy in the sylvan life which is the birthright of all the boys born within reach of them. The American school-boy of this generation will as freshly taste the pleasure of the school life at Rugby as the American school-boys of the two generations past, and he can hardly fail to rise from it with the noble intentions, the magnanimous ambitions which only good books can inspire. ”

“ Whenever it came, a heavy numbing throb seemed to take hold of my heart, and say ‘Dead—dead, dead.’ And I cried out, ‘The living, the living shall praise thee O God; the dead cannot praise Thee. There is no work in the grave; in the night no man can work. But I can work. I can do great things. I will do great things. Why wilt Thou slay me.’ And so I struggled and plunged, deeper and deeper, and went down into a living black tomb. ”

“ Tom nodded, and the bunch of keys was handed to him, with an injunction to be sure and lock the door after him, and bring them back before eight o'clock.
He walked quickly through the quadrangle and out into the close. The longing which had been upon him and driven him thus far, like the gad-fly in the Greek legends, giving him no rest in mind or body, seemed all of a sudden not to be satisfied, but to shrivel up, and pall. "Why should I go on? It's no use," he thought, and threw himself at full length on the turf, and looked vaguely and listlessly at all the well-known objects. ”

“ Tall and slight and fair, with masses of golden hair drawn back from the broad white forehead, and the calm blue eye meeting his so deep and open—the eye that he knew so well, for it was his friend's over again, and the lovely tender mouth that trembled while he looked—she stood there, a woman of thirty-eight, old enough to be his mother, and one whose face showed the lines which must be written on the faces of good men's wives and widows—but he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. ”